Sunday, September 03, 2006

Dear Apple: Finder Sux

Crash-prone Finder strikes again. I don't know if it's too much Carbon, too little coffee, or just plain stupid, but Finder crashes way too often. How often? Well, in the 2 years my wife has had her iBook G4, she never had to reboot (aside from updates). She's had her Macbook for about a month, and she's rebooted 3 times from hard freezes (beach ball, total lockup). Why? Finder is a steaming, neatly folded, pile of shit that is totally incapable of recovering from a disconnected network volume.

I posted this on TUAW a while back. A number of people didn't RTFA. While yes, sometimes Finder can recover from a disconnected volume, sometimes it does not. So, I had updated firmware on our router with a PC, and upon reboot, it reassigned IP addresses to the computers on the network. The practical upshot? When my wife opened her "never crashes" Macbook, and Backup begins a few hours later, suddenly the drive she's used to backing up to is "missing" for OSX. That's just plain stupid. I mean UNIX WAS MADE FOR NETWORKING!!!

Only Apple could fuck up UNIX so bad it borks a simple network connection. Now this presents a neat little question though... Will Leopard's Time Machine, which requires an external drive, get all jacked up like Backup when it searches for a network volume whose only crime was to have a host PC change IP address? Or will Apple just expect all notebook users to dangle a Firewire (400 only, thanks guys) drive from their machine?